


Bittersweet

by Truth



Category: Fairy Tales (trad)
Genre: Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2007, recipient:Baranduin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-26
Updated: 2010-10-26
Packaged: 2017-10-12 21:44:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/129397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Truth/pseuds/Truth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A child's heaven, preserved forever in memory, sweet - and bittersweet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bittersweet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [baranduin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/baranduin/gifts).



  


## Bittersweet

  
Fandom: [Fairy Tales (trad)](http://yuletidetreasure.org/get_fandom_quicksearch.cgi?Fandom=Fairy%20Tales%20\(trad\))

  
Written for: Baranduin in the Yuletide 2007 Challenge

by [Truth](http://yuletidetreasure.org/cgi-bin/contact.cgi?filename=53/bittersweet)  


When we were children, our favorite place was the small pond on our grandmother's farm. It was a goldfish pond of concrete and stone, set at the bottom of the herb garden. It was a fair distance from the house, hidden beneath the drooping boughs of an enormous lilac tree and surrounded by lilies - the perfect place to hide from our parents. We'd splash in the water while we watched the bright fish dart to and fro beneath the lily pads; flashes of orange and white and black amidst the green leaves.

In the cool of an early summer evening, it was the best place in the world to lie on your stomach and tell each other stories and laugh at nothing at all. For some reason, for all our sibling squabbles, when we got to the pond, we never fought.

It was always early summer when we visited our grandmother and, for some reason, it always seemed the perfect time of year. All the promise and freedom of summer were open before us with school and the harsh winds of winter already almost entirely forgotten. It was those stolen moments that turned us from a pair of feuding children into brother and sister, twins, closer than anyone else in the world.

It was a child's heaven, preserved forever in memory, sweet... and bittersweet.

My sister died when we were both sixteen, killed in a car crash on an icy February road. It was the sort of accident that was nobody's fault - an act of God, they called it. I think, sometimes, the lack of having someone or something to blame was what tore our family apart.

The summer after Kate died, we didn't go to our grandmother's farm. My parents wouldn't let me out of their mutual sight, and father never went with us - so we couldn't go. The following summer, my parents were in the middle of a messy divorce and my father insisted that I spend those two precious weeks with his parents, in their tiny condo just outside of Chicago.

They were the most miserable two weeks I'd spent since I lost my sister, and my grandparents were no happier than I at the disruption to their life. A pair of elderly people in a small condo don't want a sullen teenager inflicted on them for two weeks without notice or permission, no matter how much they might love him. We survived the experience, thanks mostly to their careful patience, but it wasn't fun for any of us.

I was sullen, never doubt it; sulky, self-destructive, hateful; the teenage trifecta that you resort to when you find yourself trapped in a place from which there is no real escape. It wasn't just my the condo that I wanted to escape from. I wanted to be released from the strange and painful place that my life had become since the loss of my twin.

Escape was college, which I managed to skim into by the metaphorical skin of my teeth. I'd let my grades and attendance go to hell after the death of my sister. Why would I care where I went or what I did? From now on, I'd be doing it alone. It wasn't until I realized that college would get me away from the unconscious power games of my still-feuding parents that I started reaching for it.

That first summer, I refused to go home. I wrote to my grandmother instead, asked if she could use an extra hand at the farm. I'd never done that kind of work in my life, but I'd spent years watching it, and I knew what all the basic jobs were. If she were to give me a job, it'd be charity on her part - but I'd get the job done... and I wouldn't have to spend my summer shuttling back and forth between my parents, listening to them fight at every transfer.

I'm lucky, I guess. I got a phone call a few days before exams ended, telling me to come out to the farm. I sent a letter to each of my parents, telling them where I was going and what I was doing, packed my bags and went.

I hadn't bargained on how hard it would be to walk down the long drive to the farm. The last time I had been here, my sister had been with me, and it made me miss her all over again. The time of year helped a little, I think. There was still frost in the morning, and the summer birds hadn't yet begun to sing. I drowned the memories in hard work and long hours, trying to ignore the lengthening days and grateful that my grandmother gave me a room as far removed from the one I used to share with my sister as possible.

I avoided the herb garden and the fish pond at all costs, finding excuses to take another path whenever my chores took me in that direction. It couldn't last forever and I knew it. I just wanted to get past those magical two weeks that would drag me, kicking and screaming, back to face memories that I wanted to stay buried.

I was going to be a college Sophomore soon. I was in a band, sort of, I'd pierced my eyebrow and both my ears during my rebellious stage, and I was saving up for a tattoo. Guys like me didn't hang around their grandmother's goldfish ponds and cry. That way lay madness. Next thing you know, I'd be writing morbid poetry, dying my hair and reading bad novels about vampires.

It couldn't last.

Eventually, just before the lilac's blooms turned brown, I took my courage in both hands and walked through the herb garden to the fish pond. It felt... important. Significant, somehow. This would be the first time I'd gone to our place alone. I'd been afraid it would feel like betrayal, but instead it was a disappointment. That was almost worse.

I was too tall to duck easily beneath the lilac branch, now. My legs were too long to fold comfortably beneath me and the edge of the pond was no longer a comfortable perch. It was still cool, still lovely, but ... it would never be the same. There was no magic here, if ever there had been, and I'd never be able to recapture the time we'd spent here.

I was not going to cry.

The sun was setting as I sat there, arms wrapped around my knees, staring at the faint flashes of color in the dark water until I couldn't see them anymore. Misery was my companion, having lost all hope at being able to recapture something that had been possible only because there were two of us. On my own....

I didn't cry and that, at least, was a relief.

"Where is she?" The abruptness of the question nearly startled me into tipping over and landing amongst the goldfish. Catching myself with one hand, I stared around wildly, trying to find the speaker.

There wasn't a soul to be seen and I found myself wondering if I'd imagined it. It wouldn't be the first time, after all. Since Kate's death I'd often imagined I'd heard her voice. That hadn't been her voice, though. Even death wouldn't turn an alto into a bass.

Well, as far as I knew.

"Where is she?" An impatient bass at that. I looked around again and decided I was dreaming. It was a far more comforting thought than seeing reality in the ruined memories around me.

"Kate's dead," I told the voice, sticking my foot in the pond and watching the fish disappear beneath the lily pads. "She's been dead for years now."

Conversing with disembodied voices was neither therapeutic nor 'freeing' I was discovering. It still like prodding a half-healed injury, even if it didn't really hurt. This wasn't the place to talk about Kate. Splashing in the water again, seeing the flicker of color as the fish scattered again, I scowled.

"... well shit."

That didn't sound like anything I'd dream. For one thing, I'd be aiming for mild sympathy, not anger. It was irritating. I pinched myself and it hurt, but dreaming was still more reasonable than disembodied voices.

"Yeah, so sorry to bring bad news." I scowled at the water, unable to see my reflection in the ripples and just as happy. "Thanks for the sympathy and all, but I'm bearing up just fine."

There was no response and I decided that I'd had enough. Dreams, imaginary voices or flat-out hallucinations, I didn't need this garbage. Getting to my feet, and knocking my head against a drooping branch of the lilac, I sulked back to the house.

I spent the next three days working on the fences in the upper pasture and staying far from the herb garden and the pond. I worked until I was so tired that I was sure I wouldn't have any dreams and I tried not to think about Kate. Considering the fact that my grandmother's house is stuffed with photographs of our family, it was a plan doomed to failure, but I tried.

On the fourth day, my supposed day off, my grandmother decided that she'd had enough of my 'moping' and threw me out of the house for 'a nice, long, healthy walk'.

I didn't want to go for a walk. I wanted to stretch out somewhere and brood about the unfairness of the world at large and my own memory and imagination in particular. Unfortunately, you don't argue with my grandmother, not successfully at any rate, so I went.

I walked down to the brook. I walked out to the far pasture. I walked around the upper pasture four times, gaining little but puzzled looks from the cows. I walked down to the diner by the highway for lunch and back up the hill to the house. I walked and I walked and all I could think about was how much I'd rather be doing just about anything else. I had a project for one of my fall classes that I could be doing, and had avoided up until now out of sheer inertia.

The fastest route back to the house from my latest wandering route would take me, guess where, right past the goldfish pond. I squared my shoulders and went.

Nothing happened... and maybe I was just a little disappointed by that.

By the time I had all my books in front of me and was ready to work, I was more than only a little disappointed. Imaginary or not, the voice might have been willing to hear what I had to say about Kate's death - something which no one else had ever wanted to hear. The school psychologist didn't count, mainly because I didn't really want all of my private feelings scribbled down in my permanent file.  
She'd warned me that if I didn't talk about it I might have problems, and maybe imagining insensitive basso voices was one of those problems. Still....

I gave up and started reading, highlighter in hand. It was a pleasant evening, with a faint breeze to stir the curtains. My grandmother's flower-garden was just outside my bedroom window and the scent over-rode the chemical smell of my highlighters easily, without being over-powering.

By bedtime, I had at least a solid start on my reading. I helped clean up after dinner and went to bed. All that walking was almost as good as the work of the previous days and I dropped off almost immediately.

"Michael." The basso voice was back, but I wasn't exactly happy to hear it. I enjoy my sleep, and I didn't want to wake up. I flopped over in my bed, grabbed my pillow and pulled it over my head. "Michael!"

Persistent bastard.

"Go away." It came out quite a bit more muffled than that and I had to free myself eventually in order to be able to breath. "Go. Away."

"No."

Again, I couldn't see anyone, and I resigned myself to a conversation with a disembodied voice. "It's," with a glance at the clock, "almost three in the morning! What the hell do you want?"

"Kate." The voice was suddenly grim. "But I'll settle for you."

I blinked. "What?"

"Do you believe in magic?"

I rubbed at my eyes and pinched myself. I was awake, hard as it was to believe. "No. That sort of thing went out of style with Disney Princesses and Harry Potter."

The voice muttered something I didn't quite catch, but figured had to be pretty rude. "You used to believe in magic."

"When I was five, yeah. I also believed in the Smurfs!" I sat up and reached for the lamp. When the light went on, the room was still empty. "I wanted a car so I could have a Transformer of my very own."

"It was a truck," the voice corrected me, sounding displeased. "And you still believed in magic just a few years ago - or Kate did."

"Kate also believed in the Norse pantheon, mapping the human genome and the inherent talent of most boy bands!" Just because I loved my sister didn't mean that I thought she was sane. "... and how did you know that?" That truck had been one of my most secret and cherished desires as a kid.

"Do you still not believe in magic?" Now he sounded smug.

"Yes." I stifled a yawn, glaring around the room. Whoever it was had to be standing in the garden. The voice was coming from that direction.

"Kate believed."

Smug bastard. I got up and headed toward the window. "Santa and the tooth fairy and handsome faerie lords who would sweep her off to their far-away kingdoms. Yeah, I know."

"You never wanted any of those things?"

I peered out into the darkness. I couldn't see a damn thing, but the voice was right there. I should be able to see something on the other side of the screen. "I thought the tooth fairy was creepy."

"That doesn't mean you didn't believe in it."

I snorted. "Until I found my dad sneaking a quarter under my pillow."

"That doesn't mean that magic doesn't exist."

This... was beginning to bother me. I wasn't having a psychotic breakdown. I'd taken psychology last year and it was amazing how many weird mental issues had actual, verifiable symptoms. Hearing voices was one thing, but this didn't quite fit. "Who are you?"

"A poor unfortunate idiot, suffering under a curse." He sounded angry again.

I couldn't help it. I really couldn't. I began to laugh. I laughed until I nearly couldn't breathe, clutching at the windowsill and hiccoughing madly. By the time I recovered, the voice was gone - or at least he didn't speak again.

I didn't sleep very well after that. I spent half the night sitting up trying to remember everything about Kate's obsession with magic and fairy tales that I could, which wasn't much, and went back to avoiding the pond.

I avoided it for a month, receiving no further nighttime visitations, until I felt prepared to try for another possibly imaginary conversation. By the time I finished my work for the afternoon down at the milk barn, I was so restless that the foreman asked if I had ants in my pants. I told him I had homework to do and he laughed. I didn't hang around to discuss my paper, instead heading for the goldfish pond.

I nearly hit my head on the branch again, but managed to duck at the last minute. Dropping down onto the edge of the pond, I looked around self-consciously before asking, "So. A curse?"

I waited nearly five minutes, finally beginning to fidget before there was a sullen response.  
"I thought you didn't believe in magic?"

"I... don't." I bit my lip and glared down at the murky water. "But Kate did, and she's gone. If this is magic," which I still didn't believe, "then maybe it's a connection to her - somehow."

"Maybe." The response was grudging.

"So." The suspension of belief thing was difficult and I kept trying to figure out where the tiny speakers were hidden and wondering if there were a couple of jokers in the main hay barn laughing their asses off at me. "You said you were cursed."

"Yes."

"What sort of curse?"

The deep voice sighed disgustedly. "A very unpleasant one. A word of advice, Michael. Don't ever insult a barista at an occult coffee shop."

I stared at the water, imagination abruptly derailed. Coffee shops didn't exactly fit into any of Kate's favorite stories. "A... what?"

"Just accept it at face value. Magic exists and it wouldn't do very well if it only occurred in castles and deep forests, not in this day and age. Apparently witches work at coffee shops to supplement their income. I didn't know."

I managed not to start laughing again, but it was a stretch. "A girl at a coffee shop hung a curse on you for being a jerk. With you so far."

"At closing time she took me out to the park and dropped me in the fountain. I found myself... here."

"Here." I scowled. "So you've been eavesdropping?" I didn't like the sound of this. "On us, on my sister? For how long?"

It was a stupid question. If Kate had been dead for two years...? Suddenly this entire thing was creepy in a new and horrible way.

"Just the last couple of years." The admission was grudging and almost ashamed. "Then... you didn't come back. I was starting to think I'd be here forever."

"You were spying on us when we were fourteen?" Creepier by the minute. "What the hell did you want Kate for?" There was a long pause with no answer while my mind raced. "This isn't one of those 'convince someone else to take on your curse' things, is it? Or, or some kind of human sacrifice? Or -"

He cut me off. "No! She was a little kid. What do you take me for?"

"Some guy who's an asshole!" I was furious. "What the hell were you after!?"

"Someone who believed in magic. Someone who could believe I was real! I've been living in this damn pond for over four years! I don't want to be here forever!" He was angry and more than a little desperate and that calmed me down a little.

"I believe you're real," I pointed out flatly, "and if you spoke to Kate even once, she'd've believed it in a heartbeat." Something was bothering me. "If you're the pond, how could I hear you up at the house?"

"I'm not the pond. I'm in the pond," he told me, exasperated. "And there's more to it than that!"

I looked around the pond suspiciously. Eventually, my eyes snagged on a somewhat malformed lily pad. I reached out and twitched it to one side, finding myself nose to... whatever it is that amphibians have, with a perfectly enormous frog.

"You're a frog?" That explained the voice, I suppose. I nearly tipped over into the pond, more interested in staring than in keeping my balance. "Oh my god, I remember this story."

"Good for you." The voice was coming from the frog even if his... lips, or whatever they were, never moved. He sounded less than impressed. "Only it's not like the story."

I wasn't really listening, too busy following the story to its conclusion. "You've been stuck here for four years, waiting for Kate to kiss you?"

"It's not as easy as that!" Apparently I'd pissed him off, as he disappeared under the water and didn't come back.

Eventually, somewhat sore from sitting on the concrete verge of the pond, I got up and went back to the house. I spent the entire evening totally preoccupied in trying to remember what else there'd been to the original story.

Prince gets turned into a frog. Frog finds princess and talks her into kissing him. Frog becomes prince. They live happily ever after.

It didn't work.

Princes don't inhabit coffee shops or, in fairy tales, insult the coffee girl. They didn't stalk fourteen year old girls, or at least I hoped they didn't. Most of all, if he'd said even two words to Kate, she'd've promptly kissed him and that would've been the end of it.  
My sister, believer in magic, kisser of frogs. It's exactly the sort of thing she would've done, too.

There had to be more to it. He'd been offended that I'd suggest he'd go after a little kid, so it had to be more than a kiss. I twitched a little, not really wanting to contemplate what else there might be that you could do with a frog.

After dinner, imagination running wild, I went back to the pond.

"Why isn't it as easy as that?" I couldn't see the frog anywhere, but I was sure he was there.

"Do you really think a curse would be effective if you could just kiss your way out of it?"

I was beginning to think that grumpy was this guy's default state. "I guess not. So why Kate?"

"Because your grandmother is a little old for this sort of thing and your mother wouldn't believe in magic if she were eaten by a dragon."

I glared randomly around the pond. "Insulting the women of my family isn't the best way to get help. Just tell me what's going on here, all right?"

"Coffee-shop-girl hung a curse on me that said I'd need to be loved to turn back." The words all came out in an embarrassed rush and I found myself wondering just how old this guy really was.

"Loved?" I made a face. "How literally?"

"... that's disgusting."

I found myself grinning, at least slightly relieved. So lecherous frogs hadn't been stalking my sister. That was far more comforting than it should have been. "So... love? Someone has to fall in love with your sparkling personality? That's a pretty good curse."

"Shut the hell up. You try being a frog for four and a half years and see how cheerful you are!"

"Proving my point," I told him, laughing. "Seriously. There aren't any convenient loopholes? You just have to get some girl to love you despite your green, damp exterior?"

There was a very, very long pause. "It... doesn't have to be a girl."

"I am not attracted to amphibians," I told him promptly, "regardless of gender. Try again."

"It doesn't have to be romantic love!" I'd pissed him off again. "Just... love. Best friends, companions, what-have-you."

"If you think you're going to manage to become my best friend in the next three weeks, you have another think coming. I have to go back to school here in a bit." I felt guilty, which was something of a surprise. I didn't want to leave this poor guy here to spend the winter sleeping in the mud at the bottom of the goldfish pond. Again.

"Do you live on-campus?"

"... are you a creepy amphibious stalker, now?"

A splash made me jump and I found the very large frog now sitting on the edge of the pond, giving me the eye. Or I thought he was. It's hard to read a frog's expressions. "Answer the question."

"I live in the dorms." I shook my head. "It's over a thousand miles from here."

"Can you keep pets?"

I stared at him, feeling the hair on the back of my neck stand up. "You want to... live in my dorm with me? You _are_ a creepy, amphibious stalker!"

"Look, kid," and he sounded tired now, "I'll work with what I've got. Have a little pity. I'm willing to be the best friend you ever had and then some if it'll get me out of this pond and back to walking around instead of hopping. My family probably had me declared dead years ago. I've got nothing. Please. Get me out of here."

"... friends, huh?"

"At this point, I'd settle for a heated tank near a window with line of sight to the television."

Kate would've approved.

My grandmother didn't seem to see anything weird about my blowing a good chunk of my pay on a heavy-duty aquarium with a light and a heater, although she looked at me a little funny when I paid extra for one I could hang a little curtain around.

I'm not having any cursed frog guys watching me sleep, no matter how friendly they are.


End file.
